There is a difference between a wrist watch and a rock. The watch has been purposefully designed. More and more scientists see intelligent design in the universe, animals, and plants.
(1) MADE JUST FOR US: The universe is exquisitely fine-tuned for our existence, not only in biology and chemistry, but also in elemental physics. The expansion of water when it freezes, causing ice to float instead of sink, keeps the oceans from freezing solid. The earth is the perfect distance from the sun. If gravity were minutely stronger, the sun would burn up. Can you shuffle cards and draw at random all four aces, and do it hundreds of times in a row? No way! But the universe IS perfectly designed – mathematically impossible by chance – so human life can exist. (See Nature’s Destiny by Michael Denton;also Hugh Ross in Mere Creation, ed. by William Dembski.)
(2) IRREDUCIBLE COMPLEXITY: Race cars, watches, computers, jets, and houses are all designed. They have complicated and complex blueprints with specific, detailed information to be followed exactly in order for the finished product to work. Animals and plants are more complex still. They can even reproduce, because their living cells are crammed with tons of information on a molecular scale. The DNA in every cell contains vast quantities of highly specific patterns and information for making waste disposal plants; streets and vehicles; and factories to take in, process, and spit out stuff. Their parts are all the right size and design so that they work together. Change the slightest thing and they die. DNA is like computer software – accidental events could never, ever, have produced it. (See Michael Behe, Darwin’s Black Box.)
(3) DESIGN IN THE ANIMAL KINGDOM: Some of us know how electric motors work. There are brushes, a rotor, and something called a stator, whatever that is. You plug in an electric fan and it comes on, because all the parts work together. Many tiny little critters have hairs called cilia, like nose hairs, only very much smaller, like bunches of little tails, whipping in a designed way to help little critters swallow stuff. Each tiny cilium has a microscopic little motor that makes its tail go round. It’s a little biological motor – brushes, a rotor, and even a stator (or outer shell, I looked it up). Cilia have non-accidental, complex, working machinery like an electric fan – or a child’s toy with an electric motor – i.e. designed by Intelligence.
(4) DESIGN IN THE PLANT KINGDOM: Biochemists spend their whole lives trying to manipulate a new hybrid of corn, soybean, or a new bug resistant tomato. Their $200 college biology textbooks still preach evolution, but intelligent design shouts from every page. We are closer to landing on Mars than we are to understanding how the cell of any plant actually works on the molecular level.
(5) THE MOON GIVES EVIDENCE FOR A YOUNG EARTH: Earth’s moon is currently moving slowly away from the earth at a decreasing rate of about 4 centimeters a year. As you go back in time, the rate of moving away was much faster. In the magazine Creation Ex Nihilo 14(4):43, Sept–Nov 1992, Dr. Don DeYoung, professor of physics in Indiana, proves that if the earth were really 4.5 billion years old, it would have lost the moon long ago. But it has not! If you spin the moon backwards in time, it would only take a few thousand years for the moon to be in an orbit scraping the earth. This is very strong evidence for an earth only thousands of years old, not millions or billions. The earth cannot be 4.5 billion years old.
Just for fun, let me mention two more interesting geological tidbits: (1) all over the earth there is a thick layer of sediment. In it, fossils are found. More and more geologists are concluding that this is evidence of a world-wide flood. (2) When Mount St. Helens erupted, the big deep lake at the top spilled down the mountainside. In only a day or so, it carved a big canyon that looks exactly like a little Grand Canyon. It is evidence that the receding waters of a worldwide flood most likely carved the Grand Canyon in mere weeks, not over millions of years. (See John D. Morris, The Young Earth, and Dr. Donald DeYoung, Thousands, Not Billions.)
(6) CARBON 14 AND ISOTOPIC DATING – DECEITFUL METHODS: None of the so-called “scientific” dating methods hold up to real scientific examination. Carbon 14 dating of the back of a live snail says it is thousands of years old; radioactive isotopic dating of newly cooled rock says it is millions of years old. Like geologists who use fossils to date rocks, and rocks to date fossils, current dating methods use much circular reasoning and throwing out of actual results. They choose their numbers and don’t really prove the million-years or billion-years ages of anything. (See the work of John Woodmorappe, The Mythology of Modern Dating Methods.)
(7) EINSTEIN’S THEORY OF RELATIVITY HELPS CREATIONISTS: D. Russell Humphries, Ph.D., is a nuclear physicist, theoretical atomic physicist, cosmologist, and geophysicist. In Starlight and Time, he explains how Einstein’s theory of relativity follows the order of creation in Genesis 1 exactly, once you remove unproven assumptions of the “big bang” theory. Mathematically, Dr. Humphries neatly solves the existence of distant starlight in a young universe. Simplifying his explanation, we know that gravity bends light. But gravity also distorts time, the very same way that velocity does. At creation, the stars were flung out from a strong gravitational center, and as they went out at unimaginable speed, they aged billions of years due to changes in both velocity and gravity. And that’s good physics, and good science!